EVENT: 'Seeing-in' is a Transparency Effect

‘Seeing-in’ is a Transparency Effect
Wednesday 12 October, 16.00-18.00
Stewart House, Room 274
No registration required
Tomorrow we will welcome our second speaker this term. Michael Newall is Director of Learning & Teaching for the School of Arts, and Director of the MA in Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics, at the University of Kent. His expertise spans art history and theory, and philosophy of art and aesthetics. In philosophy of art, he has a special concern with the
philosophy and aesthetics of visual art. His interest in contemporary art and Australian art has developed in part from his earlier work as a critic and curator. In tomorrow’s presentation he will defend an interpretation of what it is to see something in a picture.

*Abstract* “‘Seeing-in’ is a transparency effect”:

Philosophers of art use the term ‘seeing-in’ to describe an important part of our experience of pictures: we often ‘see’ a picture’s subject matter ‘in’ its surface. This paper proposes that seeing-in, so far as it is a twofold experience, is an example of a perceptual phenomenon
that has received extensive attention in perceptual psychology: the perception of transparency. Seeing-in and transparency perception invite comparison initially on account of their twofoldness. I go on to show that seeing-in is subject to the same laws of ‘scission’ that are widely accepted as governing transparency perception. On this basis I argue that seeing-in can be understood as a kind of transparency effect, and that our ability to understand pictures might thus be understood as a spandrel associated with the evolution of transparency perception in our distant pre-human ancestors.